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The Washington Roundtable discusses the fatal shooting of the right-wing activist and Donald Trump ally Charlie Kirk, who was killed on Wednesday during a speech on a college campus. The panel considers whether the United States risks tumbling into a spiral of political violence, and how the Administration might use this moment to justify a crackdown on political opponents.

This week’s reading:

“Did Trump Just Declare War on the American Left?,” by Susan B. Glasser
“MAGA Reacts to the Assassination of Charlie Kirk,” by Antonia Hitchens
“Charlie Kirk’s Murder and the Crisis of Political Violence,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
“The Epstein Birthday Book Is Even Worse Than You Might Realize,” by Jessica Winter

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

Even benevolent producers who give directors total freedom to make films can’t quite do so, by dint of the fact that they’re giving it; the imbalance of power is built into their generosity. Freedom can only be taken, at a price, and, for Francis Ford Coppola, the price of freedom to make the grand-scale political fantasy “Megalopolis” was a hundred and twenty million dollars, which he raised by selling off part of his winery. He’d been trying to make the movie for about thirty years. He finally got to shoot it in 2022 and 2023, when he was eighty-three. As if its production were a solution to a long-puzzling problem, he made sure to show his work: he invited the director Mike Figgis to the set, near Atlanta, to shoot a documentary about the film. The result, “Megadoc,” which opens September 19th, is a fascinating, inspiring view of a filmmaker whose methods are as boldly original as his movie.

With “Megalopolis,” the first freedom that Coppola seized was the freedom to fail. “Megadoc” opens with Coppola admitting that he’s scared, which he calls “a really good thing”: “I’m doing something I don’t know how to do.” He’s investing his own money—but he’s not scared of losing it; if commercial failure is what it takes for him to succeed, by his own lights, artistically, so be it. The example he cites is Jacques Tati, whose personal investment in his late-career masterwork, “Playtime,” forced him into bankruptcy. “But who cares if you die broke if you made something that you think is beautiful?” Coppola says. In order for Coppola to feel that he’s making something beautiful, the documentary shows, he needs to work in a way that delights him, too: “I want to have fun.”

Before going on set, Coppola shows how he has fun with actors. He gathers members of his cast, including Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, and Jon Voight, for so-called rehearsals that are more like loose acting classes. Coppola supervises them in improvisations and exercises (such as “sound ball”), and he sometimes joins in. He tries to relax the performers with a speech in which he turns Dante’s motto for Hell into a slogan for theatrical paradise: “Abandon worry, all ye who enter here.” Coppola tells the actors, “When you’re in this space, you’re not you, you are the character you’re playing.” It’s an instruction that preserves Method acting’s element of play but dispenses with its agonized self-scrutiny.

In “Megadoc,” Figgis talks with Coppola and keeps a close watch on him at work. Unobtrusively conventional in form, the documentary is discerningly observant about Coppola’s interactions with the movie’s big personalities—including Dustin Hoffman, Giancarlo Esposito, and Nathalie Emmanuel. The actors also get time alone, in one-on-one interviews, to talk about the project. (The film’s star, Adam Driver, preferred to appear less often while shooting, but he, too, is interviewed.) Figgis also speaks with crew members and, in lieu of a voice-over narration, he puts himself on camera to reflect on what he’s seeing. Above all, what “Megadoc” reveals is that Coppola filmed the wildly unconventional story of “Megalopolis” in wildly unconventional ways, and that these methods are fully visible in the finished film.

“Megadoc” is, at heart, a story of liberation. “Megalopolis” is Coppola’s pet project, which he conceived around forty years before shooting it. (Coppola’s biographer Sam Wasson, interviewed by Figgis, says that the project was born soon after the filmmaker lost control of his studio, American Zoetrope, following the catastrophic release of his 1981 musical, “One from the Heart.”) He had tried and failed to get “Megalopolis” made before; Figgis includes clips from the early two-thousands showing a table read with Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman, and Billy Crudup, plus rehearsals of it with Anton Yelchin and Ryan Gosling. But what is liberated in the eventual production is an adventuresome process in keeping with the grand scale of the story that the film tells. “Megalopolis” is a futuristic fantasy of ancient Roman inspiration, in which a visionary artist-cum-scientist-cum-urbanist (Driver) faces political opposition for his utopian scheme of urban innovation from a plutocrat (Voight), a demagogue (LaBeouf), an ex (Plaza), and the mayor (Esposito), whose daughter (Emmanuel) he falls in love with. To realize his epic, Coppola launched a production of colossal dimensions. “Megadoc” shows that what’s truly utopian about “Megalopolis” is its mode of production; Figgis’s perceptive view of the shoot brings to the fore the artistic ideas that Coppola’s way of working embodies.

One of the constants of Coppola’s career is the intensity of the performances that he elicits. He has a background in theatre, and the expressivity that he summons in his movies often seems harnessed to the text, as if the screenplay were the thing and the movie merely its elucidation. One of the few and surprising benefits of an awful situation—Coppola’s difficulties getting movie projects financed in recent decades—is that he has had the time and the inclination to contemplate the essence of cinema, or, at least, of his cinema, which he sees as inextricably connected to theatre. (In 2017, he even published a book on the subject: “Live Cinema and Its Techniques.”) A crucial difference between “Megalopolis” and the films from Coppola’s illustrious Hollywood career is that, in the new movie, this connection is reimagined and radicalized. Far from filming the script of “Megalopolis” with precise dramatic economy, Coppola relies on his screenplay to trigger events—to spark real-time behavioral surprises.

Figgis comments that Coppola uses the script as a mere premise, and he likens Coppola’s approach to it as “instinctive,” calling the director “kind of like a jazz musician.” Voight, who says, “I’ve never worked with a more open process,” repeats a remark of Coppola’s, saying, “The script is just the bones and we’re going to have to find out what it is.” Hoffman (who plays the mayor’s fixer) describes Coppola’s way of working with actors: “In a sense, he’s rehearsing at the same time that he’s shooting.” Driver offers a trenchantly dialectical account of Coppola’s artistic and practical method: “He’s structured his day—and that’s why he’s paying for it—to make sure that he can control how to . . . trust his cast and give them total control to come up with something that he hasn’t thought of.” Daniel Ezralow, the choreographer of “Megalopolis,” discusses advanced techniques that he taught cast members (including “alternate movement” and “body therapy”) and that Coppola integrated into the performances, saying that Coppola’s work has “one foot in theatrical, one foot in cinema.” Talking with Plaza, Figgis likens the shoot to a “weird experimental theatre company.” He also puts on view the most daringly experimental aspect of the production of “Megalopolis”—and it’s not the direction of actors.

The scale of “Megalopolis” is enormous—the size of its sets, the number of its extras, the set design and costumes that it requires, the complexity of its staging. Coppola says that even “Apocalypse Now”—which, he emphasizes, used helicopters—“wasn’t on this scale.” “Megalopolis” is filled with grand crowd scenes, fight scenes, chase scenes, dance scenes, harrowing violence, public celebrations, mighty spectacles of political conflict. But, for Coppola, the massive sets and elaborate dramaturgy didn’t impose rigorous order on the shoot or dictate meticulous forethought regarding its use; on the contrary, they served as his own gigantic playground. The filming emerges as less a matter of Coppola fulfilling intricately preconceived stagings than of his setting the tumult in motion and discovering its possibilities as it’s unleashed.

When Coppola refers to fun, he means it literally. “Moviemaking is not work, it’s play,” he tells Figgis. “Toil gives you nothing, play gives you everything.” He provided himself with the resources for a great deal of play, and the freedom to engage in it. The visual extravagances of “Megalopolis” require complicated visual effects, and Coppola intended to realize them not with C.G.I. but with practical, physical devices—knowing that he’d only find out whether they work by actually filming them. The producer Michael Bederman says that Coppola “really needs to feel physical space,” and that space, shown in “Megadoc,” is, above all, felt in “Megalopolis.” When Driver and Emmanuel are seen walking on construction beams suspended from cables, they are—as Figgis shows—actually walking on dangling beams. (A 2024 report explains that the actors had no harnesses, and their safety net was trapeze netting, which they had to be taught to fall safely into.) Coppola’s audaciously improvisational approach to his sets is inseparable from the acting that takes place on them. For all the image-mad artifice of “Megalopolis,” the movie is driven by its exuberant performances. The actors’ wild, eccentric, impulsive immediacy—which Coppola’s direction not only favors but provokes, even demands—turns “Megalopolis” into another mega-documentary, an accurate record of the excitement.

A revelatory sequence in “Megadoc” shows Coppola arguing with the cinematographer, Mihai Mălaimare, Jr., about the lighting of a shot, which Mălaimare wants to keep consistent with other shots in the scene, for the sake of a conventionally smooth edit. Coppola says that Mălaimare has no business anticipating how the film will be edited, and the director lays down the law: “To me, your job is not to match all the light. Your job is to get beautiful images of the scenes that we have.” Figgis teases out of Coppola the underlying philosophy behind these free-spirited methods. Coppola, who has been directing movies since 1963, voices his frustrations with the technical and material encumbrances that inhere in the conventional, professional way of working. The emphasis on keeping things “controllable,” he says, means that “cinema is the only art that kills what it’s trying to preserve.” In “Megalopolis,” he tries to keep the live part of cinema, the theatre-like aspect, alive.

My one-word definition of theatre is fear—the awareness that there’s nothing separating performers from spectators, that what’s occurring onstage could easily carry over into the audience. Coppola famously built exactly such a disturbing thrill into “Megalopolis,” with a scene designed so that an actor comes out from the wings of the theatre, stands in front of the screen, and interviews the movie’s protagonist, played by Driver. (At a screening I attended, a publicist working for the distributor did the honors.) But even before that literally frame-breaking moment, the events onscreen in “Megalopolis” seem to escape the frame metaphorically: the hectic performances leap through it, the camera moves defy it, the sets overflow its borders, and near-cosmic visions of supernaturally biomorphic magnificence unsynch the frame from the normal flow of time.

Figgis shows a clip of Coppola planning “One from the Heart”—the project that left the ruins from which “Megalopolis” arose—and discussing the intricate electronic-cinema system, housed in a trailer called the Silverfish (which still exists and which Coppola uses on “Megalopolis”), as a way not merely to tell a story but to explore “what the nature of existence is, what the nature of being a human being is.” That’s what it feels like to watch “Megalopolis”; Coppola didn’t have the practical freedom to pursue this philosophical dream until providing it for himself.

Coppola describes his own methods and their relationship to the realities that they provoke. He may look as if he’s “thriving on chaos,” he says, but actually he is “confronting chaos.” The chaos, however, is of his own making, and, though the onscreen results are thrilling, the real-life chaos during the shoot was sometimes troubling. In “Megadoc,” Figgis asks Bederman about “the kind of safety nets that would normally be there that are missing” from the shoot of “Megalopolis.” “Well, anybody who can say no,” Bederman responds. That may have worked well aesthetically, but not necessarily in other ways.

Figgis notes that there was discord on the set, which led to the departure, mid-shoot, of key personnel in the art and design departments. “Megadoc” features interviews with the production designer Beth Mickle, who was among those who left, and who cites communication failures leaving her feeling “put in a position where there was no way forward.” After the film was done, there were allegations that Coppola, while filming a scene set in a night club, tried to kiss several female extras, and Variety published videos of such incidents; Coppola has denied the allegations and sued the publication for libel. “Megadoc” doesn’t address the matter. What it does make clear, nonetheless, is that a movie set isn’t a blank canvas but a workplace; the first human beings whose nature is implicated in a film are the ones who are working on it. Just as with freedom, chaos taken for oneself isn’t the same as chaos given to others, and the difference again involves a power relationship. What one person intends as play, another may find painfully serious. Personal freedom, on a movie set as in civil society at large, risks impinging on that of others, and the balance remains as crucial in law as it does on a movie set. The making of “Megalopolis” may not be just an experiment in the art of cinema—it may also serve as an unintended experiment in the social psychology and the managerial ethics of filmmaking, with findings of similarly great importance. ♦

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For decades, the United States backed efforts to achieve a two-state solution—in which Israel would exist side by side with the Palestinian state, with both states recognizing each other’s claim to contested territory. The veteran negotiators Hussein Agha, representing Palestine, and Robert Malley, an American diplomat, played instrumental roles in that long effort, including the critical Camp David summit of 2000. But, in their new book, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” they conclude that they were part of a charade. There was never any way that a two-state solution could satisfy either of the parties, Agha and Malley tell David Remnick in an interview. “A waste of time is almost a charitable way to look at it,” Malley notes bitterly. “At the end of that thirty-year-or-so period, the Israelis and Palestinians are in a worse situation than before the U.S. got so heavily invested.” The process, appealing to Western leaders and liberals in Israel, was geared to “find the kind of solutions that have a technical outcome, that are measurable, and that can be portrayed by lines on maps,” Agha says. “It completely discarded the issue of emotions and history. You can’t be emotional. You have to be rational. You have to be cool. But rational and cool has nothing to do with the conflict.”

“What Killed the Two-State Solution?,” an excerpt from Agha and Malley’s new book, was published in The New Yorker.

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Kevin Young is the poetry editor for The New Yorker, and the author of many books of his own poetry. His newest work, “Night Watch,” focusses on death, while also drawing upon his wide view of history, from the end of slavery in the U.S. to Dante’s seven-hundred-year-old poem the Divine Comedy. Young tells David Remnick that Dante actually played an outsized role in bringing “Night Watch” to life: “This is a book that, I think, without him, I would have kept in a drawer because the subjects were kind of dark that I was trying to contend with, and [Dante] gave a framework for me,” Young explains. “How do you write about [hell] and frame it as a journey rather than a morass?”

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.